Forgotten sidekick never escaped The Kid’s shadow

Henry Brown laughed under his breath as he rode through a heavy downpour into Medicine Lodge, Kansas, on May 1, 1884.

What a beautiful day for a bank robbery! The driving rain would keep nosy townspeople indoors while he and his accomplices looted the vault at their leisure.

Born in Missouri and raised by an uncle after losing his parents, Brown at only 17 was intoxicated by the fear his fast draw put in grown men’s eyes. After collecting his first notch in the Texas Panhandle in 1876, the hot-tempered teen moved onto New Mexico.

Gunslingers were in demand in Lincoln County, where a confrontation between competing cattlemen was about to explode into open warfare. Accepting an offer from the Chisum faction, Brown was befriended by a swaggering youth named Billy Bonney.

The two lead-slinging adolescents proved to be a deadly combination. When Bonney executed the murderers of their martyred boss, Brown was there to kill a fellow Regulator that foolishly interfered. When Bonney ambushed the Lincoln sheriff, he was again on hand to do his lethal part.

Brown fought side-by-side with Bonney matching him bullet for bullet and corpse for corpse. Yet it was Billy the storytellers turned into the celebrated Kid, while his sidekick remained an anonymous face in the crowd.

When peace finally came to Lincoln County, both gunmen scorned amnesty and in their last joint venture drove a stolen herd of horses into the Texas Panhandle. Bonney could not resist tempting fate with one more time in New Mexico, but his buddy stayed behind in Tascosa.

By 1882, Brown had worn out his Panhandle welcome. Attracted by the rowdy reputation of a new boomtown, he decided to follow the example of other outlaws by enforcing the law instead of breaking it.

Brown knew there would be an opening because the life expectancy of a lawman in Caldwell, Kansas, was shorter than a day in the dead of winter. Two town marshals had died less than a month apart, joining several predecessors in the jam-packed boot hill.

Although he doubted the baby-faced stranger would last the night, the mayor of Caldwell granted his last request by making him a deputy. Between swigs from a whiskey bottle, the drunken marshal said his shift started at sunset.

Brown had just begun his rounds when he heard gunshots from the Golden Wedding Saloon. Sensing a trap, he silently slipped into the barroom from the alley and caught two bushwhackers flat-footed. Even though he gave the pair the first move, they perished without touching the trigger.

Neither the incumbent nor the city council objected when Brown promoted himself to marshal the very next day. For backup he summoned Ben Wheeler, a Lincoln County veteran from Rockdale, Texas, and the duo turned Caldwell into a model community.

By spring Brown was bored to tears and itching for action. He still resented playing second fiddle to the dearly departed Kid and longed to step out of his shadow once and for all. To do that he had to come up with a spectacular crime even Bonney dared not commit.

Then it dawned on him. A daylight bank robbery!

Accompanied by Wheeler and two recruits, Brown entered Medicine Lodge in the middle of a rainstorm and walked into the bank. He answered the cordial hello of president Wiley Payne with the stunning announcement, “This is a holdup.”

Putting deposits ahead of his life, Payne reached for a pistol in a desk drawer. Brown’s automatic reaction sent him slumping to the floor with a slug in his chest.

Panicked by the roar of gunfire, Wheeler shot the unarmed teller, who staggered to the vault and twirled the tumblers. As he expired, the bandits bolted for their horses.

The gang no sooner saddled up than a posse was hot on their heels. Confused by the unfamiliar terrain, Brown took a wrong turn and wound up in a dead-end valley. After exhausting their ammunition, Brown surrendered by waving a white handkerchief.

The prisoners were taken back to town and thrown in a shack that served as the local jail. While cursing citizens with blood in their eyes milled around the paper-thin building, the county prosecutor whispered to Brown, “Payne still lives, but if he dies I’m afraid no one will be able to stop that mob.”

Nobody had to tell the terrified badmen that the bank president did not make it. Outraged mourners rushed the jail and ripped the door off the hinges.

Brown screamed, “Fight, Ben!” Wheeler obeyed and flattened the first attacker giving his cohort room enough to make a desperate dash for freedom. Brown sprinted half a block before a farmer unloaded both barrels of the family blunderbuss in his back.

The way his doomed companions saw it, Henry Brown got off easy. Helplessly watching the preparations for their triple lynching, they gladly would have traded places.

When it came to dying, a shotgun was better than the rope any day.

Visit barteehaile.com for Bartee Haile’s books “Murder Most Texan” and “Texas Depression-Era Desperadoes” and bound collections of his Texas history columns from the past 32 years.